Dates: August 20 – September 10, 2020
Opening hours: Mon–Sun 10:00–22:00.
Grand opening: August 20 at 19:00
Free admission. All works are available for purchase.
Exhibition curator: Alexandra Panchenko
We present the project “Alone with the Elements” by St. Petersburg artist Anastasia Slavnova.
Anastasia was born into a designer’s family in the city of Perm. Of the beginnings of her creative path the artist says:
“I do not remember the moment when I suddenly took up painting. The urge toward the visual arts has been with me all my life, from birth, when I scribbled in books, magazines, and everything that came to hand. Now I work without the vandalism, yet just as passionately and absorbedly.”
From 2012 she began to take an active part in exhibition projects in Russia and Europe. She later moved to St. Petersburg, where she studied architecture at the St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. She lives and works in St. Petersburg.
What chiefly sets Anastasia’s painterly style apart is that she is not afraid to abandon a habitual vision of the world. She deftly combines abstraction and figuration. The result is a kind of play in which the boundaries between what seems ordinary and what is a fruit of the imagination are erased.
“I do not try to copy a landscape with documentary fidelity,” the artist explains. “When I begin a work, I look within myself. Sometimes our settled idea of the world holds us back from moving forward. It is worth adding something new, looking at things from another angle. A breakthrough, a transformation, never comes without destruction, and so I am constantly struggling, trying to break the shackles of my own consciousness.”
In Anastasia Slavnova’s works the aesthetic dimension is joined to a deeper meaning. The artist’s hand is recognizable and individual. Through the repeated layering of paint, the pieces become complex and textured. Her canvases are broad horizons, planes and lines receding into boundless spaces stripped of all that is inessential. The artist herself calls her style a “psychological landscape,” in which images of nature help one leave the outer world behind, descend into the depths of consciousness, and unite with one’s inner primal essence.
The exhibition is a five-year cross-section of the artist’s work. The display includes pieces previously shown at exhibitions in Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, as well as new canvases presented to a wider public for the first time.
About the exhibition in the media: